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Friday, October 17, 2014

Go West, Young . . . Woman? Part II

We left young Asa Mercer prepared to travel back East to
bring home more brides for frontier Seattle.
But he had a few wrinkles to iron out first. Traveling took money, and the young professor
had little. But dozens of bachelors in
Seattle were willing to invest in his scheme so long as he brought them each
back a bride of good repute. Some
stories have it that Mercer accepted as much as $300 per bride, a goodly price
in those days. Whatever the amount, he left
Seattle with money in his pocket and the cheers of his comrades ringing in his
ears. But his good fortune quickly
evaporated.

As a child, Mercer had supposedly met Abraham Lincoln, and
he was counting on his connection with the president to win him a
decommissioned troop carrier left over from the Civil War as an inexpensive way
to transport his bevvy of belles. He
arrived in the capital to find it wreathed in black: Lincoln had been assassinated. The story goes that after being shunted from
one government official to another, he ended up meeting with Ulysses S. Grant,
who agreed that Mercer might have a ship, if he could purchase it.

The price requested was pennies on the dollar for the worth
of the ship, but still far beyond Mercer’s means. Enter transportation magnate Ben Holladay, whose
stage coaches had helped fuel the California Gold Rush. He offered to start a shipping company, buy
the ship for Mercer and carry the party of 700 women back to Seattle for a
pittance. Overjoyed, Mercer signed the
offered contract and went back to recruiting among the towns between Boston and
New York, which had lost not only men but manufacturing jobs because of the
war.

He must have sung a good song, for ladies lined up to join
his expedition. That is, until several
prominent newspapers began questioning not only Mercer’s motives, but the
motives of the women interested in going with him. Mercer, they insisted, was only gathering
bits of muslin that would end up in dens of ill repute or married to brutish
husbands who would all but enslave them if they weren’t scalped first. They called the women Sewing Machines,
Petticoat Brigade, and a Cargo of Heifers. One editor firmly stated that any
woman willing to go all the way across the country to find a husband didn’t
deserve one. The flood of recruits
dwindled to a trickle.

Days turned into weeks and then months, and still the S.S. Continental wasn’t ready to sail. Then
Holladay asked Mercer for more money. It
seemed the contract he’d signed stated that if the full complement of ladies
was not ready to sail on time, the price for passage went up. Desperate, Mercer turned to families and then
bachelors to try to fill out his order of passengers. While some women, it appears, had been promised
free passage (paid for by Seattle’s bachelors), he demanded that others pay
full fare and more. The money he’d been given in Seattle was spent to pay for
hotel fees as everyone waited for the ship to set sail.

Only when she did sail did Mercer, and the ladies, begin to
realize what lay ahead.